This week, I went to explore the special exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology called Amazonia: The Rights of Nature. This special exhibition featured traditional and cultural inventories such as Amazonian basketry, textiles, carvings, featherworks, and ceramics which each individual represented Indigenous communities and cultural ceremonies.

Amazonia exhibition was extremely intriguing and interested enough to attract various audiences not just including UBC students, but also children or parents as an educational purpose. The entire exhibition contained and told gripping stories including their history and cultures, but one object attracted my attention. It was one of the first few exhibits that I saw when I first entered the exhibit. It was a wooden doll that looked like a toy for children. The only difference with other ordinary toys was the wooden doll was designed with body paints that the drawings were covered the entire body of this wooden doll including the face.

The explanation provided some background information about this doll that this wooden doll was designed to used as girls’ toys, but also for practice body paints on real skin.

As this doll grab my special attention among other exhibits, I wanted to know further about this doll, especially the body paints. Why Amazonian people had to practice body paints on the doll? What’s the meaning or symbolism of those designs?

Many indigenous people performed body decoration as their rituals. Among many Amazonian people, Shipibo people are well-known for their body paints, especially on their face. The intriguing and curved designs of body paints cover Shipibo people’s faces, clothing, and ceramics. In Shipibo rituals, body paints are the primary way of representing their identities, and also represents their hope towards health and beauty. The wooden doll and ceramics usually wear body paint on their full body, but Shipibo people don’t paint their full bodies, but only faces necks or the tops of their hands and feet.

Sources

Agostino, Christopher. “Shipibo – Conibo – Stetebo: Patterns Cover the Universe .” The Story behind the Faces, thestorybehindthefaces.com/tag/shipibo-conibo-people/.

“Amazonia: The Rights of Nature.” Museum of Anthropology at UBC, moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/amazonia/.